


The Mad Ones

by Black_Betty



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, F/F, F/M, Graphic Violence, I swear!, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Reverse Big Bang Challenge, brief and non-graphic allusion to rape, happy ending!, holocaust memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-08
Updated: 2013-09-08
Packaged: 2017-12-25 23:23:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/958835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Black_Betty/pseuds/Black_Betty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The name Charles Xavier is written on a grave in Westchester county. Charles doesn't know about the grave, doesn't remember having a body or being afraid. He only knows the world of dreams, and of the minds of others. One day he touches the lonely thoughts of a sick boy on a boat to America, and that is the day when everything begins to change...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. PROLOGUE

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ClawfootTub](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClawfootTub/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Mad Ones](https://archiveofourown.org/works/958953) by [ClawfootTub](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClawfootTub/pseuds/ClawfootTub). 



> Written for the reverse-bang challenge, literally finished at the eleventh hour (sorry about that...)
> 
> Thank you so, so much to my patient and HUGELY talented artist Clawfoottub, who deserves full credit for this story, who came up idea, and whose beautiful art inspired it every step of the way!
> 
> Thanks also to Roz for the beta (you're a champion!) and to Ike and Wall for badgering me into writing when I was distracted by Gordon Ramsay (honestly, I wouldn't have been able to finish without the two of you! Thanks so much!) and to all the lovely lovelies on tumblr who cheered me on when I was whining, and to Cake who sat across from me in a coffeeshop today and said WRITE!!
> 
> I'm exhausted and pretty sure a lot of this doesn't make sense...my apologies. Welcome to the inner workings of my exhausted mind :D

The boy is only seven years old, and the coffin that holds his body is unnaturally small, a dark wood box barely big enough to fit a dog.

John Chambers digs the grave with a well-used shovel and is happy for a fleeting, gross moment that he only has to make a hole one half the usual size. His calloused hands burn after a long day and his bones feel old and weary in a way that a good night’s sleep won’t cure. He yearns for home and a glass of whiskey.

He eats his lunch during the service, watching from his regular spot as a parade of sleek black cars wind their way through the graveyard, the mourners exiting in elegant, sensible leather shoes to stand sentinel over the grave. _Odd one, this service_ , he thinks to himself. Usually when a child dies there is a lot more weeping and wailing.

Now, there is a scattered collection of people who seem only present for posterity, eyes vacant, and expressions distant and removed.  Closer to the grave, in the space reserved for family, stands a stone-faced man holding the collar of an ugly fat boy who looks bored and a blond woman with cheek and jaw pale and sharp like cut glass. There are no tears for the tiny coffin and the little boy hidden inside. A sad shame, really.

The rain starts before the service is finished, sending most of the gathered crows fluttering off to their cars for shelter. Only the woman remains and the soft-faced preacher who looks like his heart is broken in two. John smokes a damp cigarette as he shovels earth over the lowered casket, the soil falling on wood in a cascade of final, resolute thumps.

The preacher shuts his Bible and speaks the final words of the service with his eyes closed, prayer ringing through the quiet of the cemetery and the soft fall of rain.

_For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord._

John glances up and can see the woman’s face crack, and for a moment he thinks she might finally cry.

Instead, she smiles.

Not a smile of comfort with the thought of a young life finally free of pain and resting easy in the loving arms of God. No, a smile both strange and horrible that cuts John down to his very bones.  

He finishes filling the hole as quickly as he can and feels something in his chest ease when the woman finally turns and walks away, the black shape of her umbrella like a vulture’s wing cutting beneath the trees.

As he pats down the dirt and replaces the sod, he looks at the freshly carved name on the tombstone and mutters,

“Maybe you’re better off where you are now, Charles Francis Xavier.”

He scrounges around on the ground until he finds a smooth stone and places it on top of Charles’ grave, an old tradition he’d given up years ago after a life spent too often in cemeteries. After a while a gravedigger stops caring about the dead. There is always another death. Another body to be planted. Circle of life, et cetera.

He grabs his shovel and stands, knees cracking, and decides to head home early.

He needs that glass of whiskey badly.


	2. THE MAD ONES

> _the only people for me are the mad ones,_
> 
> _the ones who are mad to live,_
> 
> _mad to talk,_
> 
> _mad to be saved,_
> 
> _desirous of everything at the same time,_
> 
> _the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing,_
> 
> _but burn, burn, burn_
> 
> _like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars._
> 
> _~_ Jack Kerouac _, On the Road_

 

Charles exists in a world that has no distinct colour or shape. He cannot remember the life before, the Charles who had walked on the ground and breathed the air. He does not know what that boy looked like, what his heart had felt like beating inside a fragile ribcage. Was he sad when the metal doors closed and he was locked inside? Had he been afraid?

Sometimes in his wandering he comes across people and places that he thinks he must have known from the time before. There is a pulse to the walls and space that beats like a diseased heart, a gaping wound that the mind dares not touch.

Sometimes Charles finds himself knee deep in the sucking puss of these wounds. Sometimes there is a little boy there, who crawls with grasping hands along rotted hardwood in a grand manor, his legs a scraping dead weight dragged along behind him. The boy speaks to Charles, but no sound escapes his howling mouth. Charles cannot bear to look at him, can only squeeze his eyes shut and wish for _away_.

 _Away_.  

Charles starts with only one room. It is cold and white with stinging metal and the click-whir of brainless machines. Charles cries and cries for a long time, but no one comes. One day, angry and alone, he pushes on the wall without doors, pushes and pushes and finally melts through into another room, this one yellow and soft like the down of a baby duck. And he feels happy.

He has many rooms now. He can wish himself into any of them with a thought and a _push_. Sometimes he is alone, but sometimes there are others there—real people, not like the crawling boy in the manor, not like the gentle man with brown curls and brown eyes, his tongue swollen and black in his mouth. (Sometimes blood seeps from the man’s hairline and Charles knows that he is dead in the other world where dead things stay dead.)

The first time he finds a _real_ person in one of his rooms he assumes she is dreamt up, she is so lovely and blue. Her room is dark though, and she is afraid, curled in the corner with her scaled knees tucked up to her face, hiding her tears behind a fall of red hair.

It isn’t until he finds her there a third, and a fourth time, pushing through the same series of doors again and again, that he realizes that she is something more than a puffed up figment of his imagination. Charles is used to the King and Queen with dark faces who sit on towering thrones of purple velvet marshmallows, or the fat rolling kittens that speak with strange accents, or the tree that grows straight through the stone wall and blooms wax flowers that sing snatches of songs he knows all the words to, though he has never heard them before. The blue girl is something different.

Something about the sameness of the little blue girl, the way her eyes are always the same shade of gold, her skin always the same temperature when he places a gentle consoling palm on her arm as she cries, the concreteness of her questions when she asks him where he came from, and why he is there.

The way she doesn’t exist for Charles’ amusement and pleasure alone, a dream creature to shield him from a maddening loneliness. The day that she snaps at him and pouts when he vanishes with a thought just as her hands close down on his shoulder at the end of another game of tag, he knows she is something more. Something real and other.

“I’m not going to play anymore if you do that,” she says and Charles is full of such overwhelming joy he doesn’t even mention that she changes her own shape to hide from him all the time. She is real. Raven is real. And that means there is more than just the world of closed rooms.

He thinks that if maybe he pushes and pushes a little bit more, a little bit farther, he might be able to break out. Go to where Raven goes when she isn’t in her room, somewhere without walls, with real sky, not just painted clouds and a tissue paper moon.

And that is how he finds Erik.

***

Erik is going to be sick.

He has been on the water for five days and can’t believe he’s not used to the motion of the ship yet. Originally a boat ride had seemed like a dream, metal beneath his feet during the day, encasing his body like a Pharaoh’s tomb when he slept down in the hold at night. The more fanciful side of him, the side he tries to stamp out and still lingers, the side that protests he is only seventeen years old despite the horror of what should have been his childhood, that side had imagined himself as a kind of sea pirate standing proudly in the crow’s nest, his feet firmly rooted to the metal grommets of a towering mast.

And here he is. Proudly vomiting over the side of a growling, stinking steam liner, not a mast or crow’s nest in sight.

He can feel the metal of the ship, certainly, but something about the way it is rootless and grounded in nothing, the way the water presses against the hull in an irregular rhythm, makes him feel disoriented and constantly sick. Erik’s broad shoulders and sudden growth spurt made it easy for him to pass as older in order to find a position on the boat, something he hadn’t been able to do a year earlier in Dusseldorf when he had been looking for anything to put bread in his stomach. But since his arrival on the ship, he has been unable to complete any of his assigned tasks and the Boatswain who hired him as cheap labor is less than pleased. He appears now in Erik’s peripheral vision, his heavy brows creased in frustration, his cheeks, ruddy from the cold Atlantic wind, folded down into a frown.

Erik finishes coughing his dinner overboard and straightens up as best he can.

“You said you’d been on a ship before,” the man says, the low tenor of his voice implying he knows Erik had lied. Erik nods, responding in his broken English,

“Must be something I ate.”

The man’s expression twists further into displeasure, but he jerks his head in the direction of the sleeping quarters and allows Erik to stumble out of his sight.

Below deck the disorientation is worse and Erik gropes his way blindly to his swinging hammock. He curls up beneath his blanket, material stretched thin and molding from the damp, musty air trapped below deck, and tries to will himself to sleep. This hasn’t been the largest hardship in his life, not by far, but it is one more misery compounded onto a life of miseries and he knows that if it wasn’t for the latent anger, the pulse of violent rage sitting just below the pale stretch of his skin, he would be tempted to just throw himself overboard.

He is, as always, alone. He only has his hands and feet, his salt stained lungs and twisting stomach, his cold heart, but it’s enough to get him across the ocean. And once he’s there, one step closer to Schmidt and the end of it all. But there are times when being alone, sick and completely pitiful and feeling younger than he can remember, is enough to make him ache in a place he thought had lost all feeling. He pushes his face under his blanket, as though the other men who are snoring in the darkness care enough to see his shame. He should be used to feeling alone. He has been alone for longer than he can remember being happy.

He knows, logically, there had been nine years of his life that he had spent with his mother and father. Where he had been well fed and warm and safe. Where he had been loved.

But he can’t remember it. Has not felt a kind touch or heard a friendly, loving word in too long. Can’t remember what his mother had smelled like, or the tenor of her voice; can’t recall the shape and roughness of his father’s hands, the colour of his eyes.

Of all the things Schmidt has done to him, has taken from him, this is the very worst. Tiny pearls of memory of a life of happiness.

Erik is seventeen and barely surviving, but at least he is outside of razor wire and chemical death. He is on the other side of the war, and freedom isn’t fresh air and peace, but it isn’t agony and pain either. Erik hasn’t been liberated from the simmering, deep-rooted rage, from the nightmares, but he is slowly honing that pain into something sharp, into a weapon. And the day will come when freedom will mean finally finding a way to use it and make Dr. Klaus Schmidt pay for everything he has taken from him.

Erik doesn’t need comfort or love anymore. He is cold and remote. He is an island, an outcropping of stone. He scrapes by. He survives. He waits with perfect patience for the right moment.

If Erik were a child, afraid of the dark, afraid of being alone, he would dread the moment of drifting off into sleep. There is a fleeting breath of absolute vulnerability just before he tumbles over the edge of unconsciousness where he allows his defenses to crumble, the constant vigilance to slip away. The moment between shoring up fortifications against the horrors of the day and allowing himself to fall into the horrors of the night, of dreaming, where he can’t protect himself.

Sometimes Erik isn’t able to let go and spends the entire night awake and frantic, muscles wound so tight his entire body aches. Tonight, sick and exhausted, caught in a sudden, murky nostalgia and maudlin loneliness, he gives up. He’ll take the nightmares over this physical misery, at least for one night.

Erik is no longer Max Eisenhardt, the boy who was loved. Erik is accustomed to nightmares. He is used to them by now. As he fades away from the real world, he has the strangest sensation of a soft palm on his forehead, of fingers brushing through his hair, and chalks it up to that part of himself that dreams of being a pirate, that still tries to remember his mother’s voice, his father’s eyes.

When he wakes to sunlight through a dirty porthole, he realizes: he didn’t dream at all.

***

Erik’s mind is unlike any Charles has ever touched.

Once Charles realized there was a world outside the labyrinth of rooms available with enough pressure behind his palms, with enough of a push, he had leapt free, had breathed out and stretched himself in all directions. Imagine his joy when he realized the bonfires of light through the darkness where other people. It was miraculous.

He can sit crouched in the back corner of a man with enormous arms who swings a bat and knows he is the best, can feel the crack of wood, the thrill of the home run. Can wind himself up in a woman who shuffles and sings on a dirty street corner, her mind alight with memories drawn out of thin air. Charles can move from mind to mind, each as precious and unique as jewels and pick them up one by one, examining them in close detail, each facet, each chip, each spill of fragmented light.

There is a difference between the world inside rooms and the winding spinning outside world. Slowly Charles comes to realize it is the difference between the dream, and what he only knows in theory as 'awake'. What people think and what they dream, what they imagine and what they speak aloud with their tongues and lips are worlds apart, but Charles can see it all. He can follow a mind through a day and night and witness all the twists, all of the perversions and hate, fear and fearful love, and bright desperate hope. 

He can touch people within the rooms, can talk with them, and laugh, and run through the landscape of their mind, but when they are awake, when they move through the real world and the winding forward path of their life, he can’t touch them there. When they are awake, they are beyond his reach.

Still, he can latch onto them, can learn from them when they are awake. He can slip into classrooms and in and out of the heads of teachers, reading along with that girl, watching that man garden, that woman roll out dough, watching the news through the eyes of a half-asleep war vet who grumbles about the grainy black and white and the state of the economy. Charles feels stronger and more in control than ever. Feels like a whirlwind of thought with a direction and purpose, like the north wind, like a god of flight, and thought, and memory.

He wonders what might happen if he didn't tether himself to another mind. Wonders what it might be like to be everywhere in the world all at once. And sometimes, when he can’t keep his own wandering mind from thinking on it, what it might feel like to be alone in his own head. To be close and warm in a body of his own. To have his own desires, his own dreams, to be thoughtless and small, to feel human touch...

Erik’s mind had flared up amidst crashing thunder and an immense, unfathomable deep, a burst of electric light in a tin ship floating on the ocean. Charles is drifting through the thoughts of a fisherman off the coast of Sierra Leone, an old man who winds a line through a hook with careful steady fingers that shake and triumph thanks to a lifetime of practice. Erik's mind calls to him like a Siren song, and Charles flies to him without a thought.

Charles plunges into him like diving into the ocean, and Erik’s mind is churning like the water below him, a riotous mess of blood-splattered emotion, of mud and festering disease, and ceaseless howling. Charles is unmoored for a moment, lost in the white, frothing mess of it before he radiates with all that he can muster a sense of calm, of serenity.

The first time he enters the closed room of Erik’s mind it is blinding white, and Charles is overwhelmed by the taste of metal and blood in his mouth. Inside there is a man with large, fathomless mirrors for eyes, with a scalpel and drill in the place where hands should be and a mouth full of razor sharp teeth that split his face into a painted nightmare smile. He is wearing the white coat of a doctor, but he is cutting without prejudice, without thought of health or healing, and Charles is so overwhelmed with dread he nearly pushes out of the room on reflexive instinct.

But then he sees the boy.

He is strapped to a metal table, his mouth stretched wide with metal claws, his eyes wide with fear, his chest, thin and hollow, fluttering like a trapped bird. He does not cry, he does not scream. He looks up into the face of absolute horror, his fists clenched, skin white where it is stretched over protruding knucklebones, and stares his nightmare down. And does not flinch.

Charles has never felt such pain, nor has he seen such courage in all of the minds he has touched in the entirely vast world. He gathers his own courage and runs to the table.  Stands before the doctor as the drill descends, squeezes his eyes shut and thinks with all his might,

 _NO_.

That night, that first night, Charles pushes so hard he blows both Erik and himself out of the dream. He watches as Erik sits up in his swinging hammock gasping for breath, sweat glistening across his forehead. He is older when awake, long arms and legs, sharp elbows and knees; a body stretched thin that Erik hasn’t grown into yet, like an inherited suit.

Typically Charles will wander off into another mind once he has spilled out of a dream. The waking world is full of such tedium sometimes, and Charles rarely finds it interesting to linger while a person wallows over a bad dream in the early morning hours of their day.

But there is something about Erik. Something about the way his mind snaps shut on the nightmare sealing it away, the way he forces his heartbeat to slow, his body to swing out of bed onto bare feet despite the tremors in his knees, the queasy roiling of his gut. There is something about Erik that Charles finds himself immeasurably drawn to.

And so he stays.

***

Three days later and Erik is still sleeping through the night. He cannot remember the last time he slept so soundly, or woke so peacefully. His body is accustomed to a few stolen hours in between the locked in memories of sharp tools cutting into his flesh, or a rattling metal surgical table, or his mother, eyes huge and wet, whispering words at him before a bullet shatters her expression.

When he wakes in the morning now he has the strangest sensation that there is something he should remember, something in the dream that clings to him like the silk strands of a spider’s web. He normally tries so hard to forget his dreams, to repress them, but now for the first time he lies in his hammock and closes his eyes and tries to _remember_.

But he can’t. He gets the fleeting impression of blue and red, of a soft voice and sunshine, but it all slips away before he can get his fingers around it and hold on.

Today is the day they’re arriving in port on the other side of the ocean, and though the sleep and the strange calm Erik has felt upon waking has helped him get through each day with a little more strength and dignity, he has never been more pleased to see dry, steady land. The Boatswain gives him his money in a creased envelope and claps a heavy hand on his shoulder. He wishes Erik luck in the tone of a man who is watching someone go to the gallows, and is sorry to see him swing.

It is not the most encouraging welcome to a new country.

Erik quickly finds work clearing tables and taking out garbage in a run down Italian restaurant in a rough part of town. It pays nearly nothing, and the owners and staff grumble foul words in Italian about Erik and his still thick German accent, not knowing Erik picks up languages like he collects plates from tables. He knows exactly what they’re saying and is barely able to hold himself back from plunging their tarnished steel knives and forks into their black hearts. 

Still, though a black cloud pervades his every waking moment as he works endlessly long hours at the restaurant, weary body and soul, no time to look for Shaw, no room to breath, he finds himself sleeping peacefully and soundly through the night. Even when he wakes one morning to discover his landlord shouting at him to get out without cause or reason, when he finds himself on the street with his entire life wrapped up in a small cloth bag, he still feels his unremembered dreams like a warm blanket wrapped around his shoulders, a strange sense of peace that lingers in the small hours of the morning and into the rest of the day.

The peace lasts until Erik, beaten down by another long day of trash and abuse, crashes into the alleyway behind the restaurant and punches the wall once, twice, brick and mortal crumbling beneath his fist and dusting a fine powder over his shoes. A man is smoking further down the alleyway smothered in shadows and he smiles at Erik and tells him about a place where he can _get some of that aggression out_. Erik, full of a red hate that blurs his vision, nods and follows the man to a massive warehouse down by the water where men fight like dogs, vicious and snarling. He watches as the gathered crowd howls, red-faced and drunk, waving money and placing bets, and he thinks,

 _This is hell. I crossed the ocean to enter hell_ , before he pushes up his shirtsleeves and wades into the fray.

Later, bleeding, lying on the street, he thinks that something inside him is broken. Thinks that he should just allow the blood to drain out of him altogether until he is a deflated sack of meat, an empty shell that will wither and flake away, disperse with a strong gust of air.

His eyes slip shut.

_ERIK GET UP_

Someone is shouting at him, and the voice is entirely unknown and alien and yet also warmly familiar, the voice of an old friend, worn and lived in like something Erik has been listening to for years.

The world is hazy and dull grey and when he blinks his heavy lids open there is a boy leaning over him, his face creased in concern.

“Erik!?” He’s shouting at him and Erik weakly waves at him trying to get him to shut up. His head hurts.

There are hands on his face, pushing his hair back, a worried monologue of incomprehensible words blurring together above his head, and Erik shifts, looks up again, marvels at the electric colour of the boy’s eyes,

“Your eyes are blue,” he says, and his mouth feels swollen, disconnected from his face.

“Yes, yes my bloody eyes, Erik you have to wake up, you have to _GET UP_.”

The words seem to push through his entire body, rocketing through his veins and sparking at his fingertips and toes. Suddenly he can feel the pavement under his cheek, can feel the enormous ache radiating from his ribs, from his mouth and nose, can feel the cold of the fall air and hear the clattering clamor of New York City swimming around him.

Above that he can hear that same soothing English accent in his ear repeating _get up GET UP_ and his name over and over and suddenly he remembers. He remembers everything.  

Charles. His dreams. The endless parade of fantasy and life experienced over a multitude of nights with Charles and his pale hands, his blue eyes.

He rolls over. He gets up. He hangs onto that voice and wonders if he’s going insane.

“Not insane,” Charles says, and he’s nearly sobbing with relief, “I’m like you Erik. You’re not alone.”

Erik clings to it and forces himself to his feet.

Not alone. Not anymore.

***

Charles stays with Erik, hovering invisible by his side. For the first time ever, he has made himself heard to someone outside of the dream. Of course it’s Erik. Of course Erik, his mind burning with more life and light than any other Charles has encountered, is the one to bridge the void, to draw Charles out into the real world.

Sometimes people will remember the Charles who visited them in their dreams for a brief moment upon waking. Their minds will rouse, and Charles will watch as they run over the quickly fading remnants of their dreams, will see himself reflected in memories that slip away like streams of rainbow coloured water.

Charles doesn’t remember what he looks like, or if he ever existed in a solid body in the real world. Raven mirrored him once when he told her this, and something had felt very wrong, very perverse when he had looked into her suddenly large blue eyes, watched her scales flutter away into pale white skin and brown waves of hair. He has no sense of physical self, and so when he sees this brown haired boy reflected in the dream memories of the people he visits, he has no sense of recognition. They always forget him anyways. Dreams are solely of the mind, and impossible to keep.

Still, he can’t recount the number of times he has wished with an overwhelming ache that Erik could keep him, if only for a little while. Erik’s mind is so in control, so focused, so horrifically used to the nightmares, that he is able to clamp down on his dreams as soon as his mind changes gears into wakefulness. He forgets everything as he opens his eyes to the sun, and Charles takes comfort in the fact that his presence has allowed Erik to push through the night, to get more sleep than he has in years.

But a selfish part of him wanted Erik to remember him, to know him as he knows Erik. To remember the hours they’ve spent in dreaming together, Charles finally pushing out of the cold white room of Erik’s nightmare and into something calm, and safe.

He doesn’t know how long he’s known Erik, how long he’s been a part of his dreams at night. It feels like eternity, like forever, and he wants to keep Erik as much as he wants Erik to keep him. Together they have wandered a lazy labyrinth of corridors, have spoke about the world. Erik, scarred and concealing a close history of brutality, angry and hating everyone and everything, believes human nature to be nothing more than a pleasant mask with a sick and perverse evil lurking beneath, Sees poison running inherently through the veins of everyone who claims to be ‘normal’.

Charles, having seen into the thoughts and dreams of so many, knows that this is not a universal truth.

So when Erik rouses after that horrible night he fought in the ring, the night Charles touched his dream and found Erik a flickering bloody smear, his essence barely there and fading more with each intake of breath, the walls of his room closing in to a black box without doors and windows, when Erik wakes and takes Charles with him, _remembers_ him, Charles feels for the first time in a long, long time that he is alive.

Now when Erik meets him in the dream, he remembers the dream upon waking. He can hear Charles in his ear turning the day, and sometimes, wondrously, can feel an impression of Charles’ hand on his shoulder, on the bare skin of his arm. It is like a barrier has fallen between them and they traverse waking and dreaming seamlessly, without anything between them at all.

Charles helps Erik find the elderly German man who runs the dilapidated gym and has a soft spot for a young voice from the old country. The man helps Erik bandage his ribs, and exchanges boxing lessons after hours for Erik’s help in mopping sweat and blood off the old concrete floors and the worn out boxing ring.

Slowly Erik learns to fight, slowly he heals, and all too soon he is itching to get back to his mission. Doctor Schmidt is never far from his thoughts regardless of whether he is asleep or awake. Charles counsels patience, whispers peace into Erik’s ear when that itch to run pushes and pushes at him.  


“You don’t have any idea where to begin,” Charles says one dream as they sit beneath the twisted branches of a cluttered apple orchard. “You don’t even know if he survived the war—“

“I know.” Erik tosses an apple hard and it breaks apart on the weathered trunk of the tree across from them. Because he can, and because he likes showing off for Erik, Charles makes it explode into bright purple butterflies. Erik doesn’t even notice the display, too wrapped up in his anger as he often is when he’s in once place too long, the memories catching up with him, haunting him.

Charles sighs. “I could look around? Maybe see if someone in the city knows him?”

Charles has secretly tried looking for Schmidt, has scoured the whole world for his mind, but cannot find him anywhere. He thinks he’s dead, but Erik believes he is alive with a determined certaintly that Charles doesn’t have the heart to take from him. Charles doesn’t want Erik to reunite with the doctor, worries about what Schmidt might do to Erik if he turns up on his doorstep on day. He worries more about what might happen if Erik _doesn’t_ find him. If Schmidt is dead then there will be no resolution, no quiet in Erik’s mind. No peace or closure for the rest of his days.

Erik looks at him, sharp, and asks, “You can do that?”

Exasperated and a little stung Charles puffs his chest and says, “Of course I can. Didn’t I tell you I can go anywhere?”

When they wake he spreads out as far as he can without loosing touch with Erik. Finds a man in New Jersey with poison in his thoughts and a uniform buried deep in a heavy metal trunk with a black swastika sewn neatly into the fabric.

He also finds a beautifully familiar mind two states over and pours into her dreams with as much gold and joy as he can muster. He always comes back to Raven when he can find her. She was his first friend, is really his only friend besides Erik. She is the only person other than Erik who is able to remember him from dream to dream, who remembers the dreams when she is awake, though Charles has never been able to contact her in waking like he can with Erik.  She greets him now with excitement and then resentment, asking where he’s been, and why it’s been so long since she has seen him.

The guilt he feels colours the dream a rusted brown. Raven folds her arms across her chest and waits for his answer with a raised eyebrow and a pinched mouth that reveals how much she’s missed him. Raven puts on a show that is as much a mask as the pink skin she’s forced to wear in the real world. She pretends she doesn’t need anyone, pretends she thrives on her own, but secretly longs for family. She aches for comfort and safety but keeps the desire tucked away in a place so far inside her she’s almost convinced herself it doesn’t exist.

Charles tries to stick with her as often as he can, usually touches her dreams at least briefly once every night. With her blue skin, her ability to be anyone, she is the first person he has met who is different in the same way he imagines he is different, is so special she gives him hope that there is something more to himself that a sorrowful ghost story.

It’s just that he got so distracted with Erik, and everything Erik is and was. Has been swept away by the bright light of Erik’s mind, and the fact that Erik can hear him when he’s awake. He makes Charles feel something he’s not certain he’s ever felt before. He tells Raven this, all about Erik and how Erik is different like she is. Shows Raven New York and leads her through the dreamscape to the tiny apartment where Erik lives and begs her,

“Come to New York. Come find Erik, he needs you.” And he really means they need each other, but Raven won’t ever admit needing anyone. She is quiet and doesn’t say anything, but he thinks she’ll come. She hugs him tight and makes him promise not to disappear again. He hugs her back and swears he won’t ever leave her again. Asks just as her mind shifts, growing hazy, the walls fading to transparency the way they do when people are just about to wake,

“Come to New York.”

***

Erik finds the man in New Jersey and kills him. Charles gives him a name, shows him a street with expensive apartments and a door with a lock that Erik waves open with a thought. Erik finds the man sitting by a fire, eating an expensive piece of cheese on an expensive piece of bread and frightens him so badly he looses his bowels[RF7]  all over the expensive upholstery of his large wing-backed chair. When Erik kills him after draining him of any information he has about Schmidt (that Schmidt is in America, that he has gone west), there are still crumbs on his broad chest. Erik feels satisfied and hollow all at once, and stands for a long time in front of the man who has stopped breathing, who bleeds out over his fine silk pajamas until the fire burns down.

There is the feeling of a hand clasping his, as cool and firm as a real living person, and then Charles’ voice in his ear,

“Let’s go home Erik.”

He leaves and wishes in the small, closed off corner of his brain, the part of his mind that Charles promised never to read, that they were going home together. That Charles’ hand was real so he could rub his cheek against the stubborn bones of his fingers, feel the blood rushing underneath the skin.

With the man in New Jersey gone and the information stripped from corpse telling Erik to go west, Erik itches to get out of New York. The city seems to close in on him daily, the tall buildings leaning over until they look ready to collapse, and the sensation of all that metal, once comforting, empowering, now feels smothering. Erik needs to get out but for some reason Charles seems set on making him stay, if only for a little while longer.

Erik stays because he doesn’t want to lose Charles, but the staying chafes at him. When he asks Charles why, when he threatens to leave, Charles just asks him to wait a little while longer. And Erik is quickly discovering that he doesn’t have it in him to refuse Charles anything. It’s absurd. Charles might not even exist. Might only be a figment of his broken and lonely imagination, a friend invented by the mind of a boy who spent an eternity alone and in pain.

But when he looks at Charles in the dream, his cheeks flushed red, his wide smiling mouth and mess of brown hair, looks at him bright and alive, listens to him talk endlessly of the things he’s seen, the people he has met, his thoughts and ideas, he has to believe Charles is real. When Charles laughs and grabs his hand, squeezes it, tells Erik about all the good he’s seen in the world, and he has to believe Charles is real.

So he stays.

It becomes obvious at once when Raven arrives on his doorstep, wet and rumbled, smiling wide and familiar, why Charles wanted him to stay.

Raven has all the trappings of someone who’s lived hard for a long time. She devours food as though she might not see it again. Holds her bag close to her chest and locks her arms around it as though it might be taken from her. It’s written in the way she puts a corner to her back and watches Erik cautiously when he locks the door at night. She doesn’t trust Erik and she shouldn’t. Erik doesn’t trust her either, but Charles voice is so bright and excited in his ear when Erik first lays eyes on Raven that he can’t ignore her, can’t find it in himself to turn her away.

Raven is marvelous because her very existence means that Charles is real. But she is marvelous in her own right too, and the first time she shows him her true skin, the smooth, scaled blue of it, shows him what she can do, he doesn’t think he’s ever seen anything so wonderful, so amazing. And there is something about Raven too, something that was broken and mended, something strong and resilient that he finds kinship with, that he finds he wants to protect with his life, and so Raven comes into his tiny apartment and sleeps on the floor and when she asks him,

“What’s next?” he tells her.

“We’re going west.”

***

Erik is finally taking her with him.

She has begged and begged almost since the moment they met, since Charles led them to each other and Erik smiled and showed her a bag full of knives and told her what he was going to do with them.

Erik is only a few years old than her but he seemed ancient and godlike in that moment. Never before has she met someone as strong as she is, and just as broken. They have both been alone for so long that they don’t know how to be together, how to be around another living person. They are like two wild animals attached to each other with razor wire.

Those first weeks sit on a layer of thin ice. She thinks that at any moment she will get up and leave, will walk out of the moldy diner where they pile pennies together for hamburgers. Or rather, will wake up in the damp, straw-filled mattress to find Erik has vanished from her life as though he never existed.

At first it is Charles who keeps them close, who ties their dreams together with golden string and laughs and keeps conversation afloat, strokes his pale fingers over their arms and links all of their hands together. Charles is the one who puts them at ease and makes them feel connected, grounded, even though it only exists within their minds.

She is bitterly jealous when Erik tells her he can hear Charles outside of their dreams, can feel glimmering traces of him on his skin as he walks through the world. She hates Erik so much in that moment she almost cuts him with one of his own knives, imagines her hands around his throat. Charles has always been hers and only hers and the way Erik talks about him, like Charles is something more precious to Erik and more dear than she can even imagine, it fills her with a mindless howling rage.

Whether it is Charles’ influence or knowing Erik has control over the metal of the knife that stays her hand she doesn’t know, but they survive. They don’t kill each other and they learn to share beds and food and most importantly, most difficultly, they learn how to share Charles.

Slowly the weeks wear on, growing into months. The two of them travel together and work odd jobs here and there to make money. Raven takes on the mask of a brawny boy with a barrel chest and blond hair, a boy with an angelic face like Charles’ that makes people trust them right away, despite Erik’s German accent and the unreserved danger coiled in his every movement.

Finally, Erik begns to, not trust her, but open up some of the parts of himself locked tightly away. And one day, not long after she turns sixteen, Erik offers her a knife and a rare smile and asks,

“Want to come?”

She doesn’t ask the man’s name. She doesn’t need to. Charles draws them into the man’s dream the night before they kill him and holds her hand as she watches the man reminisce in a lusty pink haze about ripping a woman’s tattered dress, holding her down in the mud and unbuckling his uniform trousers.

Raven thinks about that woman as she looks down at the man in front of her, disarmingly frail and liver spotted, his hands quivering in front of his face as Erik holds a gun against his forehead. She thinks about the woman, and feels no remorse as she plunges one of Erik’s sharp knives clumsily into the sagging flesh of the man’s chest, as he screams and tries to pull it out and Erik finally pulls the trigger.

She looks at Erik, his handsome face splattered with blood and thinks she has never loved anyone so fiercely, nor wanted them so much.

“He didn’t have what I needed,” Erik says later when she asks why he isn’t celebrating the removal of that piece of trash from the face of the earth. His eyes go distant and his shoulders ease the way they always do when he is listening to Charles, or talking with him in his head.

Something awful and sharp twists in her gut and she steals a swallow from the bottle of whiskey Erik had taken from the dead man’s immaculate liquor cabinet.

“There’s always next time,” she says, and watches as he ignores her. Watches as a smile blooms over his face, different than any of his other smiles. She wonders when she had begun to keep track of Erik’s smiles. She wonders how she knows that this one, the one most tender and gentle is not meant for her.

She takes another mouthful of whiskey and allows it to sit in the back of her throat and burn there. Promises herself that she won’t shed a single tear.

***

The night Raven goes with Erik to kill a man is also the first time Raven shuts Charles out of her dreams. He has known Raven since she was small and weak, has watched her grow into something hard, something unbelievably beautiful. He thought he knew everything about her. Thought they kept one another in pockets sewed on top of hearts, thought they knew each other inside and out. There are no secrets between those who share dreams. Raven was the first person to really _see_ him, to let him in. And now he is shut out.

It wouldn’t be hard for Charles to press himself through the walls that seal Raven away from him, wouldn’t be hard to keep himself silent and invisible, spying on whatever it is she doesn’t want him to see. But he loves Raven, and he thinks that even though she is keeping things from him, he wouldn’t be able to be anything but truthful with her. And Raven won’t forgive him the intrusion once he confessed.

It doesn’t take long, however, for Charles to realize what it is she doesn’t want him to see. He tags along in her brain as she wakes in the morning and gazes across the room at Erik. He is sleeping tightly curled on his side as he always does, his bronze coloured hair falling in a soft sweep across his forehead, his face relaxed in the way that makes him look painfully young. He looks through Raven’s eyes as she watches the early morning light fall across the breadth of Erik’s shoulders and outline the shape of the muscles there, looks at the taper of his body down to a narrow waist, the smooth canvas of his skin marred by a crosshatch of white scars.

Feels, secondhand, the thrill of arousal that jolts through her body as her eyes linger on Erik and the shape of him, as she thinks about the way he forms his words sharply and succinctly in a strangely blended accent, about the way he tells her in no uncertain terms that she should remain in her natural state as often as she likes, and always when they are alone together.

He looks at Erik through Raven’s eyes and feels the pure want that courses through her as she looks at the part of Erik concealed by white sheets. As she reaches down between her legs and presses fingers slowly into herself, bites her lip to conceal  a gasp, as she imagined it is Erik pressing inside her instead—

Charles snaps out of her head so quickly he is disoriented and upside down.  He returns to the vacated rooms of his own mind that he so rarely visits now that he can go anywhere he pleases. Now he hides there, not bothering to fill the rooms with anything but his own sense of self, curled up and confused.

It isn’t as though he hasn’t experienced sex or arousal in the mind of someone else before.  Charles has breathed and tasted sex in every variety, in more ways than most people can imagine. He has licked and fucked and tasted, but it has always been in a scientific way, an observational way. Never before has he experienced desire. Not Raven’s desire, not a stranger’s desire distant and remote in any number of beds or bars or alleyways, but his own.

He looks at Erik and he wants him in the same way that Raven wants him. He looks at Erik and he wonders what Erik’s wide palms might feel like on his body, what his lips would feel like on his skin. And for the first time in a very, very long time he wonders where his body might be now, and what it might look like. He wonders if Erik would look on him and feel the same tight curl of want in the pit of his stomach that Raven feels, that Charles can feel suffusing his entire being.   


And following on the tails of this ache, this great swell of longing, is a burst of loneliness so severe the walls of his tiny sanctuary seem to crack and crumble. Charles is nothing. He is a little wisp of thought. He is a figment of imagination, a piece of fragmented dream that no one thinks about or remembers. He wants to be real, to be flesh and bone again so badly it aches everywhere, everything twisting and running to thick black oil, but he can’t.

He can’t be one body and one mind again. He doesn’t know the way back.

He lets the room fall to pieces around him.

***

Erik wakes uneasy and restless. He tries to remember a time when he hasn’t gotten a full night’s sleep, and comes up completely blank. Probably on that awful boat trip coming over to America.

He doesn’t care about the sleep though. More than anything, more than the wrench in his neck where he must have twisted himself with the stress of long forgotten nightmares, more than the way his body aches, limbs moving slow like molasses, is the void he feels. Even now in the sunlit hotel room, the sound of the shower running and Raven singing tunelessly from behind the bathroom door, there is a gaping emptiness in his head.

Charles is gone.

Erik can’t describe what it feels like to have Charles around all the time. It has been so long since he met him that he has forgotten what it is like to be alone in his own head.

There have been times over the years that he chafed at the constant presence, that he demanded space from Charles, desired solitude and autonomy. Now he just feels a paralyzing moment of fear. Lying in bed with the sheet tucked up around his armpits, the sound of cars growling past on the highway, he feels suddenly young and frightened.

Raven emerges from the bathroom in a billow of steam, her towel slung around her shoulders, stark white against the blue of her skin. She looks over at him and her face breaks into a smile as she leaps onto his bed with a graceful bounce that jostles him, and jars him out of his frantic moment of paralysis.

“You’re awake!” she shouts, dumping her towel on his face, and her carefree happiness chafes against him, irritates him. He sits up and gropes around for Charles, for the sound of his voice in his ear, the feeling of a warm hand on his skin, but there is nothing. Nothing.

“Raven, can you feel Charles at all? Is he here?”

She frowns and props herself up on her elbows,

“What? You know I don’t feel him around like you do when I’m awake…”

He gets out of bed, feeling abruptly adrift, unmoored. He breathes and shuts his eyes, stretching out in the way Charles taught him. He reaches for him, but there is nothing there.

“Erik…?”

“Did you dream with him last night?”

Raven sits up and wraps her arms around her knees, making herself small--a habit that drives Erik crazy,

“No,” she says, “I asked him to stay out of my dreams.”

Erik opens his eyes and stares at her, watches the line of her mouth harden, stubbornly firm and resolute.

“You what?”

“I just needed some space,” she protests, “You know how it is, he’s always around.”

“Raven what if he’s gone now, what if he thought we both wanted him to stay out—“

“He’s not gone, Christ Erik, calm down.” She rolls her eyes, “He’s left us before, and he always comes back.”

“He’s never left me before!” Erik shouts. Raven gapes at him and he breathes, tries to slow his heart rate, tries to calm down. She’s just a girl he reminds himself, can’t be more than sixteen, and yet Raven should know better than anyone what it’s like to be truly alone. Should know the fear that grips you around the throat when you realize there is no one else to help you, to fall back on.

Raven’s expression shifts and seems to soften, but she says,

“Why do you care so much…he’s not—Charles isn’t real, you know? He’s not like, a real person.”

Erik stares at her.

“He’s…what?”

She looks away from him and picks at the blankets and he gives her the moment to collect her thoughts, to explain herself, but all she says is,

“He’s not here. We don’t even know what he really looks like. He doesn’t…he’s not anybody, you know?”

He watches her fingers worry away at a thread in the comforter, the rapid rise and fall of her chest that reveals she’s not as calm as she’s pretending, and he turns away from her, seals himself away in the bathroom, locking the door with his fingers when his powers fumble and betray him.

He thought she knew, but now he can see that she knows nothing. ‘Charles isn’t anybody’? How can she not know that Charles is _everything_?

***

Charles doesn’t know where he is. He’s alone again, alone in a way he hasn’t been in a very long time. The world around him is black and shapeless, without light or discernable depth or form. His walls have crumbled, and he’s become completely untethered, his brilliant brain spinning off into the night. He is groping at shadows, his hands outstretched and touching nothing, and he is paralyzed with fear. He is full of dread. He’s lost in the dark and he doesn’t know how to find his way back, can’t see the light of any mind, much less the swirling blue of Raven’s thoughts, the pure, sharp silver of Erik.

The dark spirals on and on and Charles begins shouting, running in all directions, hammering against the shadow, clawing and scratching, ready to deconstruct, combust, burst into a million pieces or shrivel up into nothing. He screams and screams until finally there is a spike of thought like a dagger of ice, and a voice, cold and steady, wrapping him up in solid arms whispering,

“Hello Charles. You’re safe now. You’re with us.”

And Charles has never been more afraid.

***

They’ve been driving now for hours and Raven still hasn’t spoken to him. She sits with one hand on the steering wheel, the other swinging outside the car.  Normally Erik would be grateful for the peace and quiet, but now, without Charles’ voice murmuring observations and coy laugher in his ear, he can barely stand the silence.

He looks at her and she pointedly continues to stare out the front windshield, even though there is nothing on either side of the road but barren desert for miles and miles. He doesn’t know what to do to cross the chasm that has risen up between them. Doesn’t even know what he did to cause it in the first place. Erik doesn’t have time or patience for people. Normally he doesn’t care about anyone. With Raven it’s different. With Raven he’s found someone who might possibly be a friend. He never wanted friends; thought they were useless commodities. Now he doesn’t want to lose her, even as he feels her slipping away.

“There’s nothing in these,” he says to fill the void of conversation in the car. When she remains silent he sighs and reaches over the seat into the cardboard box that holds more of the files they took from the last man they killed.

Erik had been hoping something within the man’s private paperwork might lead them one step closer to Shaw, but so far that hope has been in vain. He flips now through a stack of paper stuffed into a thick manila envelope that says ‘Hellfire’ on the front of it. From what Erik can discern, it’s just the blueprints to a high class strip joint someone wants to build in Las Vegas, and he’s about to discard it as trash when something catches his eye.

There is a name on one of the contracts that looks vaguely familiar and he sits and stares at the horizon for a moment wracking his brain trying to tease out the thread from his memories. He waits for the cool rush of Charles slipping into his thoughts, running after the fragmented portions of his past to help him piece it together, but there is only silence, and that same emptiness from the morning.  He misses Charles so suddenly and so completely that it blindsides him. For a frantic moment he feels utterly at sea, alone in his own head in a way he never realized he hated so much.

He needs Charles. He’s not sure he can do this without him.

Raven suddenly shouts and raises her hands to her temples, clutching her hair so tightly that he thinks she might tear it out. The car veers wildly across the road, and Erik has a moment to throw out thanks that there is no oncoming traffic before he takes hold of the car with his powers and wretches the wheel back the other way, pulls the car over and slams on the breaks.

Raven fumbles for the handle and wrenches door open, falls out of the car onto her hands and knees and vomits into the dirt, heaving violently.

Erik scrambles out after her and shouts,

“What? What is it?” Memories of the camps come flooding back, gas and poison and endless sickness, the cold of bodies stuck together with nameless filth—

“Charles,” she rasps out of a torn throat, “It’s Charles and he’s so afraid—“ she moans and clutches her head.

He gets down next to her and grabs her by the arms, yells,

“Where is he—what’s happening to him?”

She dry heaves and shouts “CHARLES! PLEASE!” and then suddenly sags in his arms, her head lolling forward against his chest. He gathers her up in a panic, lifts her into his arms, afraid she’s passed out, that she’s gone where he can’t follow, gone like Charles is gone and Erik will be all alone again—

But she is patting his chest with a weak hand, muttering,

“It’s alright Erik. I’m alright, just put me down.”

He places her back into the driver’s seat and she rubs wearily at her forehead, looks up at him and he recoils slightly at the way all the blood vessels have burst in her eyes, red bleeding into gold. For a moment he feel absurdly jealous that Charles didn’t contact him. He could have handled the pain, the bloody eyes; he would have endured it for Charles. He looks away from Raven.

“Is he alright? Did he say anything?”

She shakes her head and swallows hard,

“No. He didn’t tell me anything but…I think maybe he ‘s back with his body.” She looks up at Erik, and for the first time since he met her, Raven looks afraid,

“He was so scared Erik. He sounded so…small.”

Erik feels abruptly angry, frustration swelling up in his chest like a tidal wave,

“Well where is he? Where is his body?” Raven shakes her head, helpless and Erik walks away from her in disgust, rounds the car and sharply swipes the stack of confidential paper from his seat. The paper bursts into the air and flutters to the ground and suddenly, in his anger and helpless frustration and absolutely overwhelming sense of powerlessness, he has a moment of clarity.

That name.

Sebastian Shaw.

He knows where he has seen it before. It was on a list of possible aliases one of the dead men had written down on a pad of paper, something he tried to burn before Erik cut his throat and retrieved it from the fire, brown and worn and barely legible.

“Shaw,” Charles had said, as though reading over Erik’s shoulder, “it looks like it says Shaw, doesn’t it?”

Sebastian Shaw is in Las Vegas. Sebastian Shaw is the alias of Klaus Schmidt. He’s found him.

He laughs, and Raven looks at him as though he’s going mad. He thinks maybe he is, though he’s never felt so lucid, so clear.

He picks up the piece of paper with that profane name written on it in perfectly legible typeface.

“I’ve found him.”

Raven stands and stares at him incredulously with her bloodshot eyes,

“Charles?”

Erik shakes the paper, exasperated with her, with how slow she is,

“Shaw. _Schmidt_. I’ve finally found him. I’ve got him. I know where he is.”

And he does. He has the address written right here under his name. He’s got him and it only took a trail of dead men with swastikas over their eyes to lead the way, all the way to the artificial, sun baked flaking glamour of Las Vegas. What a place to end it all.

And they’re only a matter of hours away.

Raven stares at him open mouthed for a moment and then says,

“But…what about Charles?”

Everything wants to screech to a halt, wants to tumble off the rails, but Erik can only see Schmidt’s face in his inner eye, and only see the face of his mother, how wide her eyes were, how frightened she was in her last moments.

He hears himself as if from a distance explaining to Raven that they don’t know where Charles is. And truly, he could be anywhere in the world. How will they ever find him without his aid? They wouldn’t even know where to begin.

With every word something in his heart screams at him, pulls at his attention but he smothers it down. A red tide is rising and obscures his vision, hones his focus to an arrow point and shoots him in one direction. Raven gets in the car, but she is upset, viciously angry with him. He doesn’t care.

He’s going to Las Vegas.

He is going to get his revenge.

***

Charles is trapped. Never before has he been anchored into one place like this, unable to stretch, to spread himself out over land and sea. Everywhere he turns there is a wall of ice that burns when he places palms against it. Sometimes there is a woman standing on the other side, distorted as though he is looking at her through a kaleidoscope, or the sharp end of a diamond. She smiles, and her teeth are there, but her eyes are miles and miles away like endless black pits.

He catches glimpses sometimes of a world beyond the cold walls, but he’s never sure if what he’s seeing is real, or a twisted fragment of a dream that has been caught and ensnared in ice. Sometimes there is the sound of a machine that beats a steady rhythm, a wheezing box of air like a broken accordion, a frail broken boy with sharp bones and writes running through his skin like a telephone switchboard.

 Sometimes there is a woman with sagging skin and a half empty bottle railing at a thickset man who simmers with malcontent. “It was a farce,” she shouts, laughing and flinging spit and food at him, smashing endless wine glasses on the floor from a dusty collection on an antique sideboard. “We put an empty box in the ground and he’s still alive and you can’t even get close enough to touch him. You’ll never touch him. He’s better than you and he’s a vegetable.”

The man brushes off his jacket and bites his tongue, clenches his fist against violence. Only tells her he’s found someone at long last, someone who is going to take care of their little problem. Someone who is going to pay them enough money so he can finally get rid of that damn vegetable _and_ put her away where she belongs. The woman sobs and laughs and spins madly through a long wooden corridor that looks bizarrely familiar and Charles tries to wrench himself away but he is stuck—stuck—

_Shhhhhhh….don’t fret sugar._

That same voice. That same smile with dead eyes. The phantom feeling of a hand on his brow pushing down, down down—

Until there is only black.

“Where is Raven? Where is Erik?”

His voice sounds too young, too small. He wishes he hasn’t said anything at all, but he asks again like a little boy who can’t help himself,

“What do you want from me?”

Before the gaping maw of nothing takes hold of him, the voice says plainly, pleasantly,

_Oh sweetheart. We want everything you are._

***

Las Vegas is a bust. She wanted so badly for Erik to find what he was looking for. She wants so badly for all of this to be over. She can’t stop thinking about Charles. Wishes that she hadn’t let Erik talk her into coming here, where everything is dead and painted over a garish pink and gold. Las Vegas is like the corpse of an old woman, painted to look like she did in her youth. It is disgusting.

She doesn’t know why she didn’t just strike out on her own, find Charles by herself. Part of her knows that it’s because Erik is right. She has no idea where Charles is and doesn’t know where to begin looking for him. But another part of herself, weak and selfish and still the lost little girl who stole rotten food from garbage cans, knows that it’s because she doesn’t want to leave Erik. The thought of being alone again…she can’t do it. She doesn’t want to.

But she’s sick with worry about Charles. Hates that she shut him out right when he needed her. Blames herself, blames Erik, hates them both with an anger that burns all through the night without sputtering, without blowing out.

She has never felt so lost, so impotent in her life, not even when she was living on the street and stealing to make sure she had enough food to survive the night. She sits on a red velvet couch in a grossly decadent lounge hidden behind a bookcase like something from a mystery novel and watches as Erik dismantles the building around them like a hurricane wind. There had been nothing in Las Vegas but a line of strippers for hire and an empty bar, closed to the public before the grand opening.

No Shaw. No Schmidt. No paperwork to burn or person to kill. No leads. Only warm whiskey and a cold trail.

She watches Erik explode like an atomic bomb, thinks about the pure, unadulterated panic in Charles’ voice when she last heard it and thinks: this is what happens when you tie yourself to other people. Their pain becomes your pain. And you can only sit by and watch as they disappear.

There is a clattering sound by the bookcase, and Raven stands, ready to fight, watches as a small girl in a smaller black skirt stands as though she had tried to stop the books from falling before they clattered to the floor.

Raven only has a moment to recognize her as one of the strippers who had been lined up for interviews before Erik is wrapping the mangled remains of a bronze barstool around her throat, lifting her into the air and pinning her to the elaborate wood carving above the doorframe.

“Erik,” Raven shouts, but Erik is moving, his hand outstretched and the girl chokes, claws at her throat and tries to breathe.

“Who are you,” Erik demands, “and where is Sebastian Shaw.”

The girl chokes again and Raven hollers at Erik, shoves him, tells him he’s killing her, she’s just a girl but he is unrelenting.

“I’m like you,” the girl rasps and Raven watches, amazed, as the scrawled tattoos along her arms unfold, transform themselves from ink to airborne wings, intricately woven with fine veins, shimmering and blue and more beautiful than anything Raven has seen in a long time, even in the magical dreams Charles spun for her once upon a time. Better because this is real, this girl is real and she’s like Raven and Erik. She’s one of them.

Erik loosens his grip, his hand going slack as his mouth falls open and slowly the girl is lowered to the ground, wheezing and rubbing at her throat as Erik eases the metal away.

“Thanks,” she mutters, glaring at Erik. She can’t be older than fifteen, and the thought of her taking her clothes off for money makes Raven sick. She swallows down the nausea, comforts herself with the fact that no one will be dancing in the club any more, not after Erik has torn it down to the studs, asks,

“What’s your name?”

The girl looks from Erik to Raven and something in her expression flickers as she takes in Raven’s appearance.

“Angel,” she says, eagerly enough that Raven suspects that isn’t her real name. Still, she nods and waves at Erik, who stands with his arms folded over his chest,

“That’s Erik. I’m Raven.” Angel nods and looks around at the room, the destroyed walls and shredded upholstery. She glances at Erik and then away again, trying for a blasé calm she doesn’t quite pull off.

“You looking for the cats that run this place?”

It is almost amusing watching Erik try to match her manufactured calm. Raven can see his nails dug into his palms, can hear the tremor in his voice when he asks,

“Do you know where they are?”

Angel looks like she might say something coy, something flip, but Raven catches her eye and shakes her head subtly. Instead Angel takes a deep breath and asks,

“If I tell you, will you take me with you?”

She’s fidgeting back and forth on leather boots that are too big for her feet; boots that must have been borrowed from an older sister, or stolen without being tried on first. It twists a knife in Raven’s chest.

She says yes before Erik can say no.

Angel smiles, and it’s beautiful. She’s beautiful.

“They’re in New York,” she says, excited, “They went to some big mansion to pick up some assets.”

“Money?” Erik asks, his face scrunched in thought. Angel shrugs.

They return to New York.

Angel goes with them.

Angel and Raven sit in the back and sing along with the radio and laugh and Angel falls asleep with her head on Raven’s shoulder.  Her hair is dark and curling and she lets Raven practice her terrible braids in the long strands of it, counts the scales on Raven’s forearms, makes Erik put sunscreen on the steadily reddening skin of his neck. Raven feels younger and freer than she ever has outside of dreaming with Charles where it is safe. Angel makes her feel like dreams are possible in the real world.

She thinks about Charles all the time. They haven’t heard from him in days. She feels sick with guilt every time Angel makes her laugh, tells Angel about him, tells her how much Charles would love her and her wings, talks about his laugh, his amazing adventures, how he made her a queen in a world of miracles and magic and limitless possibilities. Keeps Charles alive in their minds, even though it makes Erik tense and go quiet for hours.

But every day that passes without his smile, his voice, his warmth, he seems more like a distant memory. She worries that more time without him will mean he fades in her recollection like a beautiful dream.

She doesn’t want to forget him.

***

They arrive in New York and drive to Westchester. Erik is secretly glad to be avoiding Manhattan. The city is seeped with too many memories, too much blood spilled by his own hands.

They had found the address for the mansion Angel mentioned in a small private office in the Hellfire club. The office had been lavish, was permeated with the scent of cigar smoke, and a particular brand of cologne he hadn’t smelled in a very long time. He had gagged and choked on it, had swallowed a mouthful of bile and ransacked the office, found the handwritten note that said

_Kurt Marko_

And

_Westchester County, New York_

And gotten the hell out of Las Vegas as fast as he could push the engine of the car.

The town in Westchester is a quiet community of well appointed mansions, but none so grand and opulent as the one at the end of a long, winding driveway through acres and acres of land, the grounds enclosed with a forest of tall, ancient trees. They park the car in town and walk onto the grounds, crawling easily over a fence that has crumbled and fallen into disrepair, caution and hesitant fear rising in each of them with each step through the dry fallen leaves amidst the underbrush.

For his part, Erik is apprehensive and worried that the trail might go cold again, that Shaw might slip through his fingers. But more than that there is a rising tide of excitement within his heart, an inevitable pull of fate that holds him tightly in metal claws and promises that this is it. This is the moment.

There are no menacing henchmen on the grounds as Erik expected and almost hoped there would be. Part of his mind had painted his reunion with Shaw in the style of a dime store mystery book, with tommy guns and gangsters with cigarettes tucked between their lips, and Shaw in a smoke filled room, cracking his knuckles beneath a swinging light bulb in the heart of an empty cellar.

Instead the place looks almost abandoned, tall towers worn and crumbling, overgrown weeds tangled in the fountains, along the low stone walls and marble patio terrace. Still, they proceed with caution, Erik unwilling to stumble at the final length of the race, even with the rag tag pair of girls who insisted on coming with him for support.

They slip into a door that is slightly ajar, find themselves in a dusty kitchen that looks used, but ill kept. They do encounter one man in the room just beyond the kitchen, a vaulting dining room with a massive dark wood table. The man is beautiful in his sharp blue suit, smoking a cigarette with expressive hands, and he looks surprising to see them, raises a hand to—do what, Erik doesn’t know and they never find out. With a gesture of Erik’s fingers a silver candelabra clubs him once over the head and he crumples to the table with a soft thump.

It’s done quickly, and silently. Erik hopes they haven’t been noticed.

They move warily through the deep shadows of each hallway, Angel becomes more anxious, Raven more tense, the strong muscles of her shoulders coiling, ready to strike with each step further into the dark. Erik begins to wonder if the handsome man in the suit was the only one breathing the mansion’s stale air, if the house is only full of cobwebs and paintings of dead people, and ghosts.

They come upon a door that looks cleaner, more maintained than any other. The wood is smooth, and the handle well polished as if gripped by many greasy palms. When he tries the knob it is shut tight, but it’s an easy thing to unlock it, to ease the hinges so it slides open noiselessly.

Behind the door is a long corridor that points a straight arrow through a hidden wing of the house. Erik leads them down the narrow hallway lined with ancient wood paneled doors on either side, but as he swings door after door open, each room they pass is locked, and abandoned. Inside each they only find old furniture covering in yellowing sheets, the smell of mildew and floating particles of dust glimmering in sunlight that filters through smudged windowpanes covered in a tangled mess of overgrown vines.

“I don’t like this,” Raven says quietly in his ear, “something’s not right.”

He agrees, but feels drawn forward nonetheless. There is a relentless pull hooked into his belly and brain that is undeniable. It is as though he is wading through a dream, and the option to go back no longer exists. He can only move forward.

The hallway dead ends at another wooden door that looks the same as all the others, but when he unlocks it and pulls it open, there are no dustsheets inside, no cobwebs or mildew stained couches from centuries past.

Instead he finds a child’s bedroom: a large canopy bed hung with planets and stars, a rusted brass telescope by the window, a bookcase stacked with weathered books and faded spines that spell out _Jules Verne_ and _Narnia_ , and _Oliver Twist_. There is a bedside table with an incongruous framed portrait of Albert Einstein and another of a beautiful couple gazing dourly into the camera, the woman with glass features and perfect blond waves of hair, the man with unruly curls and a mouth that looks used to smiling.

And there on the bed, tucked under a heavy damask blanket, is Charles.

It barely looks like him, not the Charles whose merry laughter rings through his waking hours, whose eyes are more vivid than any colour grown on earth. The Charles who runs and dances through Erik’s dreams, who is more alive than anyone Erik had ever met, even though Charles doesn’t walk through the real world.

The boy in front of him is thin, almost skeletal. His skin is so pale it’s blue, veins running a roadmap across his face, down the arms laid bare under the rolled up sleeves of blue and white striped pajamas. Arms mapped with a grid of wires and needles tucked in between the fine bones of his hands, slowly dripping clear liquid from a plastic bag hung on a metal pole. Next to the bed is a machine that shudders and pumps air through a tube into the boy’s lungs, his lips cracked and stretched around the blue plastic keeping him full like a bellows.

But it _is_ Charles. The truth of it sits thick and undeniable around his heart, squeezing like a hungry snake until he thinks it might stop beating. Until he realizes he is no longer breathing and takes a gasping mouthful of air, noisy and loud like he is surfacing from the bottom of the ocean.

He becomes aware of Raven next to him, her hands covering her mouth, tears leaking out of golden eyes and down blue cheeks, her voice choked and small like a small child when she moans,

“Oh Charles—“

Erik finds himself moving without thought or permission, stretching out his senses until he’s aware of every bit of metal in Charles’ body, prepared to rip it out of him. Disbelief, horror, and complete unbelievable joy are warring within him. He can feel his brain shutting down each emotion one by one, unprepared for such boundless, overwhelming emotion.

Charles.

Charles is here. He’s here right in front of him, and he might be thin and unnaturally quiet, but Charles is here and he’s _real_.

Erik reaches out a shaking hand and places it on the sharp bone of Charles’ knee beneath the blanket and is so caught in the whirlwind of his thoughts, in the rapid pulse of his heart that he doesn’t notice the door on the far side of the room sliding open. Doesn’t hear the groan of old hinges and old wood.

Forgets what he came here to do until Sebastian Shaw is standing on the other side of Charles’ bed, smiling at him with paternal affection.

“Well well,” he says, and his voice is just the same though his face is strangely younger, smooth and plastic like someone has taken the excess skin and pulled and pulled at it, and pinned it beneath the perfect sweep of his hair, “Der kleine Erik Lehnsherr. Look how you’ve grown.”

Erik is caught between the sudden desire to run as quickly and as far away as he possibly can, and lashing out with everything that sings to him in the room, all the brass and iron and subtle gold, gasping it and driving it through Shaw’ smug expression. But Charles is lying there in between them, and he can’t leave him. Can’t risk him either.  Not now that he’s found him.

His hand tightens on Charles knee and Shaw’s smile grows wider,

“I see you’ve met Charles. He’s a special boy, like you are, Erik.” Shaw’s hand reaches out and smoothes a wayward curl off Charles’ forehead, fingers lingering in his hair in a mockery of comfort.

Erik has forgotten all of his practiced words, the speech he had repeated ceaselessly for years, over and over in his head, hour after hour until it became well worn and familiar on his tongue. It was a mantra of his rage, of his sorrow and grief and bloody vengeance, and he has forgotten it all in the wake of the sudden realization that somehow Shaw has put his poisoned hands on Charles. That when Charles disappeared all those weeks ago, when he reached out to Raven and then flickered out of their minds like a candle flame blown out, it was because Sebastian Shaw had slipped into his life like an insidious disease and laid hold of his body, and somehow caged in his mind.

That while Shaw had Charles, Erik could think of nothing but his own revenge.

He hates himself almost as much as he hates Shaw.

When he snarls at him, “Don’t touch him,” it’s with all that hatred and bitter rage welling up to a boiling point, until the metal is rattling in the room, and the machine that clicks and whirs with each in and out of Charles’ breath pops and strains like it might explode.

Raven is shouting his name, has one hand gripped onto his shoulder, and Shaw smiles at him without fear and says, calmly,

“Yes Erik, listen to your friend. Wouldn’t want to hurt our dear Charles, would we?”

Just as Erik prepares to strike, prepares to drive the metal blades in his pockets straight through the black pulse of Shaw’s heart, a needle of ice pierces into him. It spikes through his temples, through the center of his eyes and he can distantly hear himself shouting, is aware of his body crumpling to the ground. His entire world is encased in pain and anguish and flickering painful memories of a metal table and a man with mirrors for eyes, and blades that would cut into his flesh with no reprieve until his weak fledgling powers would turn them away.

When he comes to there is a woman standing next to Shaw, nearly naked and draped in white fur, her smile cold, her skin crackling from sharp diamond to pale creamy flesh. She sneers at him and says,

“Let’s try and keep control, sugar. I don’t want to hurt you.”

Erik is aware now that he is on his knees, gasping for air, his hands clutched into his hair as the sharpness of pain recedes with the diamond texture on the woman’s skin.

“Thank you Emma,” Sebastian says, taking hold of her hand and brushing a kiss over her knuckles. She can’t be more than twenty, not much older than Erik and yet she’s cool and composed, looking down on him like he is a smear of mud on her pristine boot heel. Sebastian turns back to Erik while Raven helps him to his feet again, and says, pleasantly, as though they’re casually enjoying wine and crab cakes at a society mixer, “Emma is helping me with Charles. He’s been more than resistant to speaking with me…though,” he looks at where Erik’s hand has crept back to the spur of bone that pinpoints where Charles’ ankle must be buried beneath the blankets, “it seems as though you haven’t had the same problem.”

There is a gleam of something in his eye that Erik recognizes and learned to fear a long time ago. The spark of invention, of curiosity and scientific exploration; a light that would only lead to anguish and the stripping of flesh from bone, of exposed nerves and ribs cracked open like a Chinese fan.

“Tell me,” Shaw says, moving around the bed to where Erik is standing resolute, unable to look away from him and his slow crawl across the room, “did he manage to reach you all the way in Germany?”

“Whatever you’re trying to do, leave Charles out of it,” Erik says, his voice clear and stronger than he feels with his heart hammering away in his chest.

Shaw laughs in the same condescending flash of teeth that haunts Erik’s dreams,

“Oh my boy, there’s nothing to be afraid of. The only thing I’m trying to do is build a better world,” and he turns to look at Raven, and at Angel who Erik had forgotten about hovering by the door, “for all of us. Our people.”

“’Our people’?” Raven parrots, “Are you…you’re a mutant too?”

Shaw smiles and reaches into the back of his waistband, pulls out a gun that has Raven and Angel recoiling backwards. Erik refuses to be cowed. _Let him try_ , he thinks. Erik could send that bullet winging back to him and shatter that sick smile into a million pieces.

As though he can hear that very thought, Shaw turns his smile on Erik and places the gun against his own temple.

“I’m sure you’ve thought about this for a very long time Erik,” he laughs, and then pulls the trigger.

The sound of the gun is loud in the stale air of wood paneled room, and Erik can feel the shock flooding through him, unhinging his jaw. He can’t move, frozen in place as Shaw warps and seems to dissolve for a moment before solidifying back into a human shaped mass, as flawless and unsullied as before.

All this time. All this time Erik had spent hating humans for what they had done to him, thought them all utterly vicious, human nature at its most basic level something that would pick apart and utterly destroy something that was different. That would make a monster of a little boy who had watched his mother die. And all that time Shaw, Schmidt, hadn’t been human at all.

Shaw is cracking his neck and rolling his shoulders, bowing slightly and grinning at Raven who looks as shocked as Erik feels.

“Aren’t you tired of hiding?” Shaw says, directing his words at Angel, eyes running over her trembling wings before they turn to Raven and the blue skin visible under the white cotton of her blouse. He looks at Erik and his expression is imploring, but Erik can see straight through it, can see the man who prompted a child to move a coin and killed his mother when he could not.

“Don’t you want a world in which the better men, the superior _species_ is in control?”

Erik stands and looks at the man who dismantled his life into tiny pieces, who ground Erik’s childhood out under his boots like broken glass. He looks at the man he’s chased across half the world, dreamed about at night and consumed his waking hours for years. Here he is at last, standing before him, outlining out the dream Erik has only thought about deep in the corners of his mind where Charles can’t find it, offering him the deepest secret wish of his heart: standing tall and proud and with nothing to hide, Charles standing next to him, Raven in her blue skin, Angel with her wings unfurled.

And then he thinks about Charles and how bright he is, a hurtling comet of power and thought racing across the world, connecting them all, now a prisoner within the white bone confines of his skull. He thinks about the boy who bent close to his ear and begged him to breathe, to get up and keep going.

And then he thinks about a woman whose brown eyes betrayed an endless well of love for her son, even in her last moment when she looked at him and told him everything was going to be okay.

“You killed my mother,” is his answer for Sebastian Shaw.

His hand has crept to his pocket, to the coin he keeps there rubbed smooth from the unwilling, obsessive caress of his fingers. He lashes out with it now, sending it shooting like a bullet toward Shaw’s skull and he thinks that maybe if he can move quickly enough, with enough surprise, he might slip past the telepath, might drive it through Shaw’s head before he can prepare himself and absorb the impact.

He is not quick enough.

That painfully familiar knife of ice is stabbing into him, carving out gaping, ragged holes in his flesh that fill quickly with black water and drag him down, down, down. He’s aware of his body flopping forward like an unstuffed scarecrow, collapsing over Charles’ prone figure on the bed, Raven shouting out for him, Shaw laughing, laughing, the sound of it poison and he’s going to die with that black tar in his ears—

_Erik?_

He opens his eyes and the world is shifting, sliding on its axis, trees growing upside down, their roots like spilled ink creeping across an iron sky. Torrents of rain are dumping a hurricane of water from left to right and the ground is breaking apart in dry chunks, pulsing with rats, and wriggling worms suffocating in a quicksand soil. The light beats electric, stripes across his vision in flashes of blue and white and he’s aware of his heart beating out loud, aware of his breathing drowning out the world in sound.

This is death. He is aware of it in the same moment it paralyzes him. He is dying and it is not peaceful, nor calm. It is the apocalypse. It is a nightmare manifest.

_Erik!_

He blinks. Standing amidst the end of the world is a boy he used to know a long, long time ago. He is beautiful and pale, his body encased in ice, his eyes a radiant blue fire Erik imagines he can feel the heat of, if only he could get close enough to warm his hands. While the world around him crumbles and cracks open, fire and black oil vomiting from the center of the universe, the boy stands frozen and immobile in his crystal chains, his mouth moving as though he is shouting though no words crawl across the distance to Erik’s bleeding ears.

He reaches out his hands, and he’s never begged before, not even in the camps, but he begs the boy now to save him. He doesn’t want to die. Please. Please. He doesn’t want to die.

He watches the boy’s red mouth seal shut. Watches his face harden as though he is becoming a pillar of stone, an angel carved in alabaster, set to watch over a land broke open to hell. Watches as the blue fire of his eyes flares, rises in colour and light so intensely that Erik has to squint to see him. He is afraid for a moment that he might go blind, the boy as bright as the noonday sun, but he can’t look away. He watches as the fire springs forth and encases the boy, melts the ice and crystal away, spreads forth and razes the earth like a tidal wave, destroying everything in its path.

Erik watches it come for him, thinks that he should run, but he doesn’t. He feels, suddenly, very calm. 

_Don’t be afraid, Erik._

He can hear the boy now, though his lips don’t move. Remembers his beloved face.

Charles. He is incandescent, radiant, and he smiles,

_Don’t be afraid._

When the wall of fire reaches him, Erik opens his arms and embraces it.

***

When he opens his eyes, he’s staring at an embroidered canopy hung here and there with planets and stars on silver ribbon. He looks to his left and there is the blond woman lying on the floor below him, her fur spilled elegantly across her shoulders, the blood from her nose dried rust brown across her mouth. Her eyes are open and staring at nothing, the white and blue of her irises bloomed completely into red that runs over her lower lashes and across her cheeks.

Next to her, Sebastian Shaw lies in a crumpled heap, his slate grey suit crumpled up around his groin, revealing bare bony ankles. His face, that same face that haunted Erik’s dreams, is as smooth and unlined as ever, except for a slit of red the size of a large coin in the center of his forehead. His last expression was one of surprise, his mouth slung open, disbelieving.

He turns to his right and there is Charles, plastic tube pulled free of his mouth, smiling at him with pale, broken lips that crease a face made more of bone than flesh.

His eyes are just the same. He remembers them lit with blue fire, and can only gasp,

“Charles,”

Charles reaches for him across the vast mesa of his childhood bed, winds fingers still pinned with wires and needles around Erik’s trembling hand. Says in a voice that is barely a scrape of sound, disused for years and years and wrenched out of a parched throat,

“Hello Erik.”

Erik twists their fingers together and holds on.

 


	3. EPILOGUE

 

ERIK

 

It’s a slow, torturous process, but eventually they get Charles out of bed. It takes all three of them spoon feeding him, shifting his arms and legs, building what little muscle they can, filling in his hollow cheeks. Charles looks at them all with wonder each and every time they appear next to him in his bed, as though he expects to slip away every time he closes his eyes.

He tastes food with the same amount of awe, each mouthful something pure and precious to be preserved, rolling soup or ice cream or tart applesauce around in his mouth before carefully swallowing it, and smiling.

“It’s wonderful Erik!” He says it every time. Once, after he leaves the room, Erik tastes a mouthful of the same canned tomato soup off Charles’ tray. It’s bland and flavourless, but he thinks about sleeping for nearly a decade and being fed through a tube, always experiencing food through the sense memories of other people. The soup suddenly seems like something new, something special, but he thinks he can make Charles something better.

Maybe one of his mother’s old recipes. She always loved to make soup.

He starts to see all aspects of the world in this new light. Through Charles’ eyes, everything thing is miraculous, but nothing so much as Erik and Raven and Angel. He speaks with them for hours, touches them with a weak hand, skin starved for affection. Erik would spend every waking moment giving him everything he wants, but he’s not sure where the lines are anymore. He’s not sure how far he can go with Charles. He’s still healing, and his telepathy still a pulsating tender wound.  It’s easy to forget that the last time Charles was awake in his own body, he was only seven years old.

It’s difficult to remember to be careful with Charles when they transfer him into a wheelchair for the first time and he sits up and laughs and pushes himself up and down the long corridors of the mansion, careening wildly into the wood paneled walls. He is effortless and beautiful and it hurts to look at him. The light in Charles makes Erik feel lighter too, but he worries about burning them both if he gets too close.

It’s hard not to get caught in the gravity of Charles, not to see the world through new eyes, not as something broken and depraved and full of hate, but something fresh, something amazing, something to wonder at. One day he carries Charles down the massive staircase, floating his wheelchair along behind them. Charles rests his head in the hollow of Erik’s throat and curls his arms around his neck, and Erik concentrates on keeping one foot in front of the other. He takes Charles out into the sun for the first time since he woke up, wheels him out into the centre of a meadow far away from the mansion. He watches him slide out of his chair into the sweet smelling grass and gaze at the sun, fill his lungs with fresh air and laugh and laugh until he weeps, and he thinks the world might not be as broken as he once thought, not with Charles in it.

He tries to keep his distance, but he always comes when Charles calls. One night Charles asks for him, his telepathic voice still weak and tentative as he tries not to push himself too hard. Erik knocks on his door and enters when Charles tells him to enter, feels his breath catch in his throat when he sees Charles in the center of his bed, naked, flushed pink from the shower, his hair curling softly around his ears.

He stutters and looks away, feels his own cheeks pink with embarrassment.

“Charles…”

“Did I misunderstand?” Charles says, hauling himself up onto his elbows. His body is getting stronger everyday, but his muscles are usually exhausted by nightfall. Even know Erik can see his arms trembling, the subtle twitch of his thigh muscle, smooth and creamy white, beautifully pale—

He averts his eyes again, and Charles says,

“I’m sorry Erik, I thought…well, my telepathy isn’t what it once was, but I thought maybe you wanted this?”

There is a long pause in which Erik tries to find the words to tell him yes, of course, but Charles isn’t indebted to him. That he would do anything for Charles, would throw his life down before his feet, but Charles doesn’t owe him a single thing.

“I certainly want you,” Charles continues, so matter of fact in the way that still surprises Erik but shouldn’t, Charles so used to keeping everything on the surface, spilling his entire being into the mind’s of others. He’s the same when wrapped up in his own body, his heart worn clearly on his sleeve.

Still, Erik stares at him, is aware his mouth is hanging open, screams at his legs to walk, to _run_ over to the bed and take this beautiful boy, the gift that is being offered to him.

In the end it’s more of a graceless stumble, his arms tangling in his shirt as he hauls it over his head, his feet tripping over his discarded trousers, clambering up on the bed and sliding his body along Charles’ to make them both moan.

Charles experiences sex in the same way he experiences food. He tastes every mouthful of Erik, his lips, his cheeks, the skin above his heart, his cock hanging heavy between his legs, and he wonders at it, he marvels. He looks up at Erik with his impossible eyes as though he can’t believe he is allowed to touch, as though Erik is something worthy such adoration.

Erik worships him in return, and Charles arches and moans and curls into every stroke, every touch and tug, his body shaking from the exertion, from sensation until he is barely able to breathe. Erik shushes him, kisses him slowly and deeply, feels like his heart is going to burst. He is clumsy and fumbling, has never done this before always so stuck on revenge, but he wants so badly to make this good for Charles. He knows what feels good, knows what he wants, and so he sucks Charles cock until Charles comes with a low groan, his telepathy flaring and swallowing Erik up, the intensity of Charles’ bliss tumbling him over into his own orgasm.

Afterwards he holds Charles and thinks he’s never had his hands on something so precious. He finds himself hoping and wishing for the first time in a long time, fierce and selfish, that he never has to let go. That he can keep hold of this, forever.

“You will,” Charles mumbles as he drifts slowly downward into sleep, “I want to stay here. I want to keep you.”

He never thought much about what he might do after Shaw was dead. He thinks that’s probably because he never intended to survive a confrontation with Dr. Klaus Schmidt. But he’s alive now, and Shaw is dead and buried deep in the woods, his head removed from his body, and when he looks at Charles he sees something like an open door and a warm fire and a soft body to touch in the night, who might touch him in return. He sees comfort, and a life full of love instead of loneliness. And for the first time since he was a child he breathes, and he knows: he is not alone.

 

RAVEN

 

They leave Erik and Charles in the big house, tucked away in the woods, safe and hidden from the world.

Part of Raven wanted to stay there for forever, stay with Charles and Erik and watch Charles get stronger. Help him stretch his unused muscles, put meat back on his bones, and show him a world he had only ever experienced through the eyes of others. But staying also meant watching them grow closer to each other, the two people she adores more than any other, and the longer she stays, the more she feels like there isn’t a place for her, even with a labyrinth of rooms and endless corridors to explore.

And there is another part of her that itches to get back on the road. She has never stayed in one place for very long, never had a reason to, always moving, always seeking out new ground to try out underfoot. The mansion, once a place of death, a prison of Charles’ childhood, is slowly becoming a home, the walls soaking in the flavour of laughter again. The mansion is no longer needles and pain and nightmares wet with blood, but Erik cooking his mother’s recipes in the kitchen and Charles singing in the shower and Angel slowly weeding out the garden just under Raven’s window so that beautiful things might grow there again some day. It fulseems like maybe a place she could come back to and call _home_.

But for now, she watches Erik tighten his vigilant circle, spin closer and closer into Charles’ orbit, and feels the pain of loss clench her heart,

Knows she has to go.

She didn’t expect Angel to come with her, though she secretly hoped she might in the quiet place she locked away in self-preservation long ago knowing that wished-for things rarely came true. Angel is settling into the rhythm and flow of the mansion, seems to thrive in the quiet parts of the day, and Raven wants nothing more than peace for Angel.

Still, when she slings her bag of clothes over her shoulder, creeps toward the back door under the cover of night and finds Angel waiting there in borrowed trousers and a grin that slices white and gleaming through the night, Raven does not even try to say no.

Together they fly across the countryside, hitch their way to the big city, steal bread and apples and picnic in central park. They lie there and listen to the birds, sleep in the grass and laugh wildly into the rising sun.

They creep into the cellar beneath a dimly lit room where a man in glasses and curls presides over a hushed crowed, fiddling with his wrinkled collar in a way that reminds her of Charles with a sudden pang. In the smoking shadow of the room they crowd close and listen as he spins out words that gleam like cut glass washed up on a beach, about _blasts of leaden verse_ and _iron regiments of fashion_ and _the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality_. Angel reaches out and holds her hand tight and Raven thinks, “change is coming.”

They drift down to Harlem, when the air is hot and thick, the people crushed together and squeezing life out of every drop of sweat. Meet a beautiful woman with an accent that calls to mind jungle birds and rain on wild palm leaves who looks at Raven like she knows she’s is not really tall, broad shouldered man with skin the colour of dark chocolate, who calls Angel ‘little sister’ and tells them she’s been working on poetry too, scrawls words on a matchstick box,

_But I who am bound by my mirror_   
_as well as my bed_   
_see causes in color_   
_as well as sex_   
  
_and sit here wondering_   
_which me will survive_   
_all these liberations._

She tosses the matchbox poem and a wink at Raven and wanders away, the light of her cigarette disappearing into the clutter of an alleyway.

Later, in another sticky, sweaty room that is less a bar and more the run down basement of someone’s home, Raven twirls Angel to a quick saxophone and shuddering drum, lifts her up and watches her laugh and brush her hands across the low stone ceiling before Raven dips her down again.

That night, or rather in the navy blue hours of early morning, the two of them collapse into their shared bed in the tiny crooked boarding house. Sweaty, buzzed high on wine and sweet liquor, breathing in the moon and stars, and Angel turns her face as easy as she moved her hips on the pulsing, crowded dance floor and kisses Raven. Slides her hands into Raven’s hair and opens her mouth, and Raven is drowning, is pushing Angel over with shaking hands and sliding her dress open, palming at her breasts and listening to her breath quicken.

They are clumsy and fumbling, but it is electric when Angel rubs a hand over her, slides fingers into where she has only even touched herself before. Angel kisses her over and over again, even when she is breathing so hard she can’t move her lips, can only taste Angel with a lazy tongue until she has to bite down hard on her lip to hold in her scream as mounting pleasure builds, explodes, rockets down her spine.

Afterwards Angel laughs and smokes a cigarette and lets Raven stroke her hair, and Raven wonders if Charles can feel her joy from this far away, wonders if he can still reach her in her dreams if she reaches out. Wonders if his gift has healed itself or if it is sequestered to his head and the minds of those he can see with the naked eye.

Her answer comes a few days later while sitting on a curb with Angel drinking pop from a glass bottle, watching boys play ball in the street and the steam rise up off the pavement. There is a bead of sweat tracing its way down the back on Angel’s neck, her hair piled on top of her head and out of the way, and Raven wonders what it might taste like if she placed her tongue there and licked at it like a cat with cream.

A voice crackles loudly into her head like static in a broken radio and she clamps her hands down over her ears, her bottle of coke smashing across the sticky pavement.

Angel is asking if she is okay, her eyes wide, her mouth moving, but Raven can only hear Charles, his voice excited, British and smooth like melted chocolate, the way it always was before, in her dreams,

“Raven?” he is shouting, and she hollers about the volume, annoyed and at the same time so pleased, so relieved to hear him in her head again.

He’s laughing and apologizing and embracing her mind like a blanket made of fur, like an animal winding its way around her feet. He’s asking how Angel is, and saying that Erik is there holding his hand, and isn’t it wonderful, and _Raven, turn around, there’s a boy behind you who has the most wonderful ability, it’s as though he can do_ everything _, go Raven go!_

So Raven and Angel meet a boy who can adapt to everything, who is tall and skinny in the way many boys are right before they fill out and become handsome, and he takes them to where he’s fixing up an old rusted Plymouth in his grandma’s garage. He wants to become a taxi driver, to make some cash and _get outta this hole_ , and they tell him about Charles and Erik and the house hidden in the woods.

Later, when Darwin is driving them out of the city toward Westchester, Raven lies in the backseat and watches the clouds move around the sky in lazy patterns through the open window. She listens as the gears grind in the Plymouth, listens to Angel telling Darwin about her Abuela who taught her to dance, and sings along with the radio

_Though we’re apart, You’re part of me still, For you were my friend, On Blueberry Hill_

And she thinks she might be happy.

**Author's Note:**

> I still want to tag on a small epilogue from Charles as well...I'm pretty bummed I couldn't get that done in time...
> 
> sorry about the overly indulgent historical references at the very end...I couldn't resist throwing a few real life, period appropriate figures into the mix :D Props for the title go to Jack Kerouac, and the quotes in Raven's section are from Alan Ginsberg and Audre Lorde, both of whom would have been in New York City during the early-mid 50s, which is when this fic is set...
> 
> I'm just going to stop now and post this thing---if you got to this point, thanks for reading!!


End file.
